Love this passage:
Mr. Eastwood’s loose, at times very funny performance in the early part of the film is one of its great pleasures. While some of this enjoyment can be likened to spending time with an old friend, Mr. Eastwood is also an adept director of his own performances and, perhaps more important, a canny manipulator of his own iconographic presence. He knows that when we’re looking at him, we’re also seeing Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name and all his other outlaws and avenging angels who have roamed across the screen for the last half-century. All these are embedded in his every furrow and gesture.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/movies/12tori.html?8mu&emc=mua1

Weird, almost 17 years ago, I thought I was watching Clint Eastwood in his grand finale in Unforgiven.

What a legend.

Has he, with the incredible storm-surge of a past 20 years put himself as the No. 1 Hollywood star of all time?

Went to a movie with friends one night when I was in college, don't even remember what movie it was. What I do remember was the movie trailers starting up and the first one had a bunch of cutaway scenes. It was obviously a western but I didn't recognize any actors the first minute or so. Then came a scene where the person had his back to the camera in a dimly lit setting, and the person slowly turned around, and when the light hit his face, the crowd in the three-quarters full theater started cheering like crazy.

It was Clint. The trailer was the first I saw of "Unforgiven."

That still stays with me. How Eastwood could get a theaterful of people going nuts by appearing in a movie trailer.